Pro-union bill under attack

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.workers.org/2009/us/efca_0521/

Fight to save Employee Free Choice Act!

Published May 13, 2009 3:24 PM

The economic crisis continued to batter the working class in April with an official job loss of 611,000. This brings the total number of jobs lost since December 2007 to 5.7 million.

Unemployment is at 8.9 percent and is expected to continue climbing with no end in sight. Total unemployment, however—which includes another 8.9 million workers forced into part-time work and those who have given up looking for a job— rose to 15.8 percent, or more than 25 million.

More than a quarter of the unemployed have been out of work for more than six months, the highest rate since 1948 when the government first started keeping track.

The U.S. government does not publish statistics on how many union jobs have been lost in this crisis, but at a minimum it is many hundreds of thousands. The toll this is taking on all the unions—from manufacturing to services, from steel workers to hotel workers—makes the effort to pass the Employee Free Choice Act now pending in Congress all the more urgent.

Workers need EFCA

The bosses are using the crisis to lower wages, shorten hours, reduce or take away benefits and worsen working conditions. Workers everywhere are made to swallow concessions out of fear of losing their jobs and having to compete against masses of other jobless workers.

Where there is no union, the bosses are all-powerful. For the unorganized workers, from Wal-Mart to Starbucks to Home Depot, their only defense in this crisis of mass unemployment is to have a union.

The bosses know this. That is why they are waging an all-out campaign to destroy the central provision of EFCA—the card check system—which allows workers to form a union when a majority sign union cards.

Right now the boss can demand a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) supervised election before allowing a union in. The election process is dominated by the employers. Companies engage in spying, intimidation, forced anti-union meetings on company time, illegal firings, and threats to close down while the union is completely restricted. And if the workers manage to get organized into a union, the companies drag out the bargaining process so that the chance of getting a contract signed is minimal.

FULL story at link.